Snowclones are the new cliches

The Economist's language blog, Johnson, makes this interesting observation:

Rare are those moments when learning the word for something brings a whole new category into your understanding of the world around you. I had one of those moments recently when I learned the word "snowclone". It is a phenomenon so pervasive and mundane that it never occurs to you to give it a name, but once you discover that there is one, you wonder how you managed without it.

If a cliché is a well-worn fixed phrase, like "he hit the big-time", a snowclone might be described as a meta-cliché: a phrase template, in which one or more of the words is a variable. The term was coined in 2004 in reference to the common journalistic trope of the form "If the Inuit have a hundred words for snow, then X have a hundred words for Y". Once you start looking and seeing, you quickly identify dozens of fixed forms, which are especially common in hurried journalistic writing and in the titles of books, songs and articles, viz.:

X is the new Y
X me no Xs
A few Xs short of a Y
Have X, will travel
What happens in X stays in X
If that's an X then I'm the Y
Man does not live by X alone
and so on.

Shortly after "snowclone" was coined, Language Log (which gave the term its semi-official stamp of approval and has a great selection of posts about it) recorded the snowclone "X is the dark matter of Y", and applied it in the phrase "Snowclones are the dark matter of journalism".

I think this is absolutely true. Snowclones are hidden from view yet exert a huge gravitational pull, tugging the words we write into pre-determined shapes. They are even more pervasive and insidious than clichés, precisely because most of us only dimly realise they exist. Clichés may be the first resort of the lazy writer, but even the moderately careful writer can use a snowclone all too easily.